In Mario Batali’s Kitchen, You’ll Refrain From Shouting

This interview with Mario Batali, the chef, cookbook author and television personality, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q.When you walk into a busy kitchen in one of your restaurants, what can strike you as off-key in terms of how people are interacting?

A. One of the big rules for our kitchens is that if you’re not close enough to be able to touch me, you can’t talk to me. A lot of people will yell across the kitchen because it’s just easier and faster. That doesn’t work with us, so our kitchens are smaller, and you need to talk in a conversational tone. If you can’t, you have to move toward me, because if you’re yelling at me, there can be problems understanding the nature of your message.

Q. The whole culture of yelling seems to be celebrated in some restaurants’ kitchens.

A. I worked with a lot of yellers over the years. My opinion is that yelling is the result of the dismay you feel when you realize you have not done your own job. Everyone in the restaurant business knows it’s not going to be busy at 5 p.m. It’s going to be really busy between 7:30 and 9:30 or 10, and then it’s going to taper off a little bit. And it is as inevitable as Christmas. So it’s the chef’s job to prepare the staff for what will inevitably come. And it comes every night, so it’s not like, “Oh my God, what happened today?” The reason the chef yells is because the chef is expressing dissatisfaction with himself or herself for not having prepared you properly. And then, of course, the obvious scapegoat is the person who’s the least prepared.

That said, if someone isn’t learning, my strategy for changing someone’s behavior has always been a stern, relatively direct conversation, sotto voce but within earshot of their peers — not mocking them, yelling at them or calling them names — and telling them exactly what I expect them to be able to do the next time we go through this. Their peers can hear it, so the message is clear to everyone.

Photo

Mario Batali, the chef, cookbook author and television personality, has restaurants in the New York and Los Angeles areas, as well as in Las Vegas and Singapore, with his business partner Joe Bastianich. Yelling in the confines of a small kitchen, he says, simply isn’t necessary.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

A. Well, one of the most important things is realizing you’re not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times. And understanding that is a crucial component of the kind of self-deprecation that makes someone really good at understanding other people, especially when they’re faced with their own limitations and they come to you for help. It’s about being able to empathize and understand and communicate, even under stress, in a way that helps them solve a problem, as opposed to becoming part of the problem. The first day that a chef believes that he or she knows everything is the first day for the rest of their life that they will be a jerk, because you can’t know everything about our field.

A. My dad was a heat treatment engineer for Boeing, and there was a process and a directive that you needed to repeat every day. His job was to go in and find out if there were any flaws in surface metal. His understanding of the necessity of that kind of careful process was a big part of us growing up. I’ll never forget the time I was over at a friend’s house and he’d call and say, “Mario, come home.” I said, “Why, Dad? Is everything all right?” “Yeah, come home,” he said. So I would come home, and in the drain there were still chunks of stuff. It had been my turn to do the dishes, and the dishes were done. The kitchen was clean, but the job had yet to be completely finished. And I said, “That’s ridiculous.” But understanding the importance of a job being completely done stuck in my mind.

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Because of that, I’m fastidious, and I need to have everything in order. And having everything in order is important, but it’s not the only objective. It’s better to start with order and move toward chaos than to start in chaos and try to move toward order, because as a business model, chaos doesn’t work.

Q. Let’s talk about hiring. How do you interview people?

A. The first thing I’m doing is looking them in the eye. I can tell in about a minute whether they’re going to work out. I will also look at their résumé. If they have experience in places I am envious of or like or know people at, I will call the people they work for because that’s the quickest path to understanding somebody.

But in about a minute or two, I can tell whether I like you. I want to see if you have a gentle, smiling eye and a happiness, but I also want to see if you’re driven, and whether you’re paying very careful attention to what I’m doing. If I move my hand quickly, they should see that — not that they’re distracted by it, but I want to see if they’re paying attention, because that’s the key to understanding cooking.

It’s really about having your senses on fire all the time. Even though I’ll give you a recipe to make veal saltimbocca, you’re never going to learn it from that recipe. You’re going to learn it from standing next to the guy who knows exactly how brown it should be at exactly the right time. You get three days to five days to pick up on a station working with somebody else. By the end of the fifth day, we will have shown you a dish that you need to see 100 times. Of those 100 times, we will have not let you touch it the first 20. We will allow you to touch it, but not finish it, the next 30 or so, and we will have allowed you to start it and finish it the next 50 times. At that point, then you either know it or we should think about putting you somewhere else.

Q. Cooking skills are one thing, but how do you know if somebody’s going to fit into the culture?

A. I can tell by where you’ve worked, and I can tell just from a conversation with you whether you’re attentive. I also don’t hire managers. The highest position we’ll hire for in our kitchens is a line cook. Then people move up after I’ve seen them work.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2012, on Page BU2 of the New York edition with the headline: In His Kitchen, You’ll Refrain From Shouting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe